Say Hello To Kraken - The Eyes And Ears Of Tomorrow's Battlefield

US Army
Following successful field tests at White Sands Missile Range, the Army placed orders for a new force-protection system that combines several technologies into one platform.

Nicknamed Kraken after the mythological sea-creature with untold tentacles, The Combat Outpost Surveillance and Force Protection System (COSFPS) integrates radar, unmanned sensors, surveillance cameras, remote-controlled weapons, and gunshot detection into an interface controlled by a couple of soldiers with a lapotop.

Kraken uses:

11 cameras aligned to cover a 360-degree view including electro-optical/infra-red, low-light perimeter and FLIR, HRC-X all weather day and night thermal cams, with two rotatable radar cameras attached to ten meter poles.

The elevated radar sweeps people at up to 10 kilometers, vehicles at 20 kilometers, and in an Army press release Pvt. James Benham said, "We've been able to positively identify targets before they got in range with weapons on our [outpost]. They have tried to raid us multiple times, but we have been able to positively identify them and engage them before they got close."

If the radar somehow fails to pick up an intruder, the seismic or acoustic sensors will, and generator powered M249 or M240 machine guns then automatically track the incoming target.

What all the hype really screams is that the military may finally have found a way to connect several battlefield elements into one platform -- on a limited scale.